V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

Deschampsneufs said, ‘I don’t know why you people worried your heads so much for. Of course they had to give it to a black man. And a black working man.’ He had been sending in slogans like everyone else and was a little peeved.

‘Eh,’ Eden said. ‘I don’t see why for you grudge a poor black man. After all is they who does drink the blasted thing.’

‘Me grudge. Is for you to grudge. Wait. You will see where you getting this poor and this black from. Poor black man! You call that a slogan? They call it a competition. But look at the prize-winners. They pick one in this part, one in that part, and they mix up the races to keep everybody sweet. And all of all-you was busting your educated brains. That is what is happening in this island. Wait. Just now they will have foolish black men like that one running the place. Not because they brilliant and so on, but because they foolish and they black. You just wait for this Royal Commission.’

‘And a damn good thing too,’ Eden said.

‘You know, Eden,’ Deschampsneufs said reflectively, ‘the one thing I can’t understand is why you didn’t win this competition. You didn’t have to send in a slogan. All you had to do was to send in a photo. In Technicolor.’

Eden was something of a buffoon. He was the blackest boy in the school and for some time was known as Spite because some boys said he was black for spite. His reputation as a buffoon and his special relationship with Deschampsneufs had been established early at Isabella Imperial. In a third-form science class one day the master held up a simple device and asked whether we knew what it was for. It looked like a two-pronged fork with a shiny handle; both prongs were hinged to a wooden or metal base. It might have been a switch, of the sort scientists ‘threw’ in films. Deschampsneufs, sitting next to Eden, whispered, ‘It generates electricity.’ Eden whipped his fingers at the master, demanding to answer. ‘Hush!’ the master said. ‘We are getting news from Adam. Yes, Eden?’ ‘It generates electricity, sir.’ The master went wild. He threw the device on the floor. Then he took up everything within reach on the long lab bench and let it fall. ‘Let’s drop it. This and this and this and this. Let’s drop everything.’ He dropped two or three light bulbs; he was like a man suddenly indifferent to his personal safety. ‘It generates electricity, sir. You get this to generate electricity, Eden, and I will give you my salary for the month. For the month? I’ll give you my salary for the rest of the year. For the rest of my life. I will give you my pension. I will work for you in the evenings. I will send my children to an orphanage and divorce my wife.’ So it had gone on, the agitated red man railing at the placid black boy, until glass shattered on the floor — a test tube or a light bulb; and as it shattered, the master bellowed: ‘I will work for you in your garden.’ He had saved it for last, not only the familiar pun on Eden’s name, but his statement, white man to black boy, of what he considered Eden’s true role, that of garden-boy or yard-boy. It was cruel; it went too near the truth; Eden’s background was of the simplest. Our traditions were brutal; but now we all went still. Deschampsneufs stared down frowning at his crossed arms, like someone sharing the abuse.

Later, when the incident had become a joke, Deschampsneufs claimed that he knew what the device was and had deliberately misled Eden. I don’t believe he knew, though. I believe he was genuinely using or misusing a word he had just acquired; and I believe his shock, at his error and the abuse that followed it, was as great as ours. But this became their relationship: Deschampsneufs the comic, Eden his willing straight man.

We were talking one day about marriage and the absurdity of the institution that would turn all the foolish boys we knew into husbands, lords and masters to girls who, poor things, could not at that moment guess their maturing fate. We went on to talk about selective breeding. Deschampsneufs laid down the restrictions he would apply. On this subject he was allowed a certain authority. It was known that in the slave days the Deschampsneufs had kept a slave stud-farm on one of the islets off Isabella; the Negroes there were said to be a super-race still. Eden, attempting to clown and perhaps also looking for a tribute to his own superb physique, said, ‘Champ, you would let me breed?’ Deschampsneufs considered him. ‘It would be a pity to let the strain die out,’ he said. ‘Yes, Spite. I think we will let you breed. But we will have to cross you with a damn intelligent woman.’

Much was forgiven Deschampsneufs because from the security of his aristocracy he mixed easily with the poorest and crudest boys; in this he was unlike the son of the English clergyman who, possessing only piety, didn’t acknowledge black boys in the street, and thereby made himself ridiculous. A lot more was forgiven Deschampsneufs because he was witty and inventive. He loved, for instance, to put a price on a boy; but only he could have got away with it. Only he would have been allowed to say, of a boy he didn’t like, ‘He wouldn’t fetch five dollars.’ Outrageousness of this sort was required of him.

‘All you had to do,’ he now said to Eden, ‘was to send in your photo. In Technicolor.’

But he didn’t get his laugh. The moment was wrong. His tone was wrong; it was touched with a genuine bitterness. Browne didn’t like it. Eden, taking his cue from Browne, didn’t like it either. If they were younger they might have come to blows. Eden would have dumbly done what the new mood required of him. But not even angry words passed between them then. The teacher arrived; everyone went to his desk. The declaration of war was left unmade. In this new stage of the old war between master and slave it was left to me to have the fight with Deschampsneufs, a fight I never looked for. I had my own fantasies. I had made my decision to leave. It was horrible to me to be identified with those who struggled outside the gates of the Cercle Sportif.

My father’s movement faded. Even in our house he faded. He had become a remote public personality, the possession of everyone; he was, occasionally, a name in the newspapers. I found I no longer tried to visualize his day concretely. Such private concern seemed unreal. At school there was no more talk of Gurudeva or riots or burnings; we all preferred, for various reasons, to forget that frustration. The injustices of the slogan competition had also been forgotten. We had a new excitement: the Christmas meeting of the Isabella Turf Club. The Inquirer told us every day that racing was the sport of kings; and just as there were depressed boys who were prepared to talk endlessly with Cecil about models of motorcars they could never hope to drive, so now there were boys, in the Isabellan scale no higher than grooms, who talked endlessly about the sport of kings. They knew the names of horses, jockeys and trainers; they knew about pedigrees, past performances and handicaps. I couldn’t believe in their interest myself. I hated racing; I hated the gambling that went with it. But even I was forced to learn a little.

The main race of the Christmas meeting was the Malay Cup. The Inquirer annually told the story of this cup. It had been given to the Turf Club at the turn of the century by the governor, Sir Hugh Clifford. Though it was on Isabella that Sir Hugh exercised his first colonial governorship, he regarded all his service in the Caribbean, in Isabella and elsewhere, as exile from Malaya, to which he was devoted; and he spent much of his time in Government House writing a book of Malayan memories called Coast and Kampong which, after an unfavourable review by Joseph Conrad, committed him to the further literary exercise of a lengthy correspondence, ripening to friendship, with the as yet little known novelist. The Malay Cup was Sir Hugh’s parting gift to the island he had liked less than literature.